


Totalised

by Thene



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: A Cyborg Manifesto, Canon InJokes, Cyborgs, F/F, Office Sex, Philosophy, Torture, Villains, mad scientist femslash, philosophy of science, using science for evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-22
Updated: 2009-11-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 13:26:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thene/pseuds/Thene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best Christmas presents are the ones you pick out yourself.  Dr Clark cherishes her cyborg ninja project, and she hires a research assistant to help her out with the nanomachines.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Totalised

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to the folks at [Little Details](http://little_details.livejournal.com) for their advice on Japanese movies, and to [Fly](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fly), for convincing me to finish this.
> 
> This fic deviates from canon: in MGS1, Naomi says that she didn't start working at FOXHOUND until after Clark's death; the Database has that ass-covering retcon that says that Naomi never met the reclusive Clark, but somehow rescued Frank and covered up Clark's murder anyway. Yeah, to hell with that - I wanted some mad scientist femslash.
> 
> Being Clark, there's lots of references in here, some more pretentious than others. The most pretentious are to _A Cyborg Manifesto_ by Donna Haraway (including the header quote) and to various theories of Nancy Cartwright's (...the philosopher, not the VA), and there's also one line from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. This fic also contains massive MGS4 spoilers &amp; MPO spoilers, torture (not very graphic), cyborgification, crack theories, fake science, and one injoke so tasteless I really have no idea how to warn for it.

_"The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."_

  
It's been seven days, or six if we don't count the one you spent defrosting, and I wake between a crisp sheet and a patchwork quilt and in spite of the opulent comfort and the aches in my joints and the stale underground air, I feel like it's the start of 1971 all over again. No one else will be up this early, because they were all busy long past midnight except me. Back then, I was working dawn til dusk, trying to run a field hospital out of a few trucks hidden under tarps by the Atrato River - they'd keep watch over me at night, in case Gene and you attacked. (But I'd've been up like a shot if you'd come - just for the chance to see you _move_.) I wouldn't have even known it was 1971 if the radio man hadn't wished me a happy new year.

But I remembered that new year, because it was the start of the rest of my life and everyone else's. And today it's a new millennium - we're together again, so I took another early night so you and me could have our early morning. Don't you love being back with FOXHOUND? It's not like the old days, and not everyone's right here, but we're all back in touch again now. Adam's here, and last night I guess he was lighting fireworks with the rest of the agents. He's like a parody version of himself these days - as grey as I am, but running wetwork and interrogations like he's still twenty years old. Sigint, he's not around but he phoned me in the afternoon, and told me he was going to watch out the night to see his AIs grow up. He wrote them to think and to replicate - and they made up the whole millennium bug hoax and stitched themselves into all its patches, so as of this morning, they're in control. And Zero said he was staying up too, in case there was a UFO invasion. Maybe he wants to be abducted again? I don't know. And I haven't heard from Eva, but I guess that's for the best.

So that just leaves him, and you. He's not gone yet. Zero needs him, and I think we all do. I guess he wasn't _awake_ last night, exactly; he doesn't wake or sleep any more. I've taken what I needed - more genes, some charred Snatcher parts (a reminder, that: I will always make my cyborg parts fireproof), and I know I've got to figure out a permanent way to secure his mind, but for now he can stay in a cryo vault in the basement while I get working on you. No one knows he's there except me, Sigint and Zero. We didn't tell Adam. You know it would break his heart. Sigint made a lock for that room; it's a magnetic seal like no one else could devise, opened by a little strip of metal with a code written in numbers less than a nanometer high. There's only two locks like that in the world - I keep both the keys on a chain around my wrist.

The other's on the culture tank in the backroom of my lab.

I'm coming there now, to be with you.

I've been wanting to do this to you since you were fifteen. Since the first time I saw you - how fast you were and how you were never in the wrong place for a moment, how you moved your feet, _everything_. You were meant to be perfect. You were the most exciting experiment I'd ever heard of and I still haven't forgiven him for ruining you.

I've been making perfect people for almost thirty years. On and off, anyway - initial success, strong follow-up studies and then a slow phase where it was just an offbeat side-hobby I had (the 80s were a waste, too much politics - you should know - and all I got round to was cloning Major Raikov for a dare and that was such a bad idea that we wound up discarding the product somewhere in West Africa, but never mind that), and now back to this, to _refinement_. I heard you met one of my early works. I heard he killed you. I've moved on from that wholesale approach - my tools are so much more sophisticated now, and I don't need to make perfect people any more.

Now I can make people perfect.

I can take anyone and change them - flip the switches that make them who they are, and make them into something better. Something more like _him_ \- for all his flaws, he's the best soldier there's ever been, so I've always used him as a template for making people be like him, and yet better. I'm still working on fine-tuning it, but that's why you're here.

We can both help each other out. You've got unparalleled skill, reflexes, instinct, training. You _used_ to be perfect, and you're still the best except only for him and his clones, so you're an ideal starting point for the gene therapy experiment. I need you. And _you_ need _me_, too. Because you're dead, and I can fix that...

...sort-of.

 

*

The best Christmas presents are always the ones you pick out for yourself. They brought you to me in an cryo vat, and when I opened it, I saw your broken skull with a blood-soaked bandanna still tied around it, and it was like you'd been wrapped in a holiday ribbon.

I didn't get _everything_ I asked for; Madnar had vanished before our squad arrived to pick over the wreckage. But he left a lot of information on the Snatcher project - a set of notebooks that Adam's been translating for me, and an MSX2 cartridge I'm surprised that Sigint still had the right hardware to read. (Why does he still use those things?) Not to mention all those spare parts.

I've been enjoying the cosy winter celebrations with old friends; you've been lying in a culture tank in my lab, thawing slowly back to room temperature and having your cells infused by a solution of regenerative enzymes. I've had to send a lot of emails, call in experts, learn a lot; this is as new to me as it is to you, but the great thing about science is that there's always other people's work to guide you. And we've been making cyborgs for a long time now - modern medicine is all about improving on nature. We're replacing human beings an organ at a time, until they become fully obsolete. Especially for a soldier, nature isn't good enough any more - soft skin, biological needs, all that needs upgrading.

We've a lot of work to do together before you can be a perfect soldier again. We'll need knowledge of a dozen varieties, not all of which I have; how to code genes, how to code programs, design circuits and robot joints and unbreakable armour and how to make you be invisible and be everywhere at once. You have the most important piece already; how to kill like a machine. There's work I can outsource to technicians at DARPA, and I've been talking to an Armstech engineer who's working hard at making everything vanish. I don't want him to know about you but he's willing to send me a prototype stealth unit. People will do anything for the Patriots, especially when they don't know what we are.

There's a lot I'll have to learn about you. I've never cared this much about a weapon before. Now I want to stay up all night going over cyborg schematics, trying to find Madnar's mistakes and fix them because I know I can do better than him.

Other people can make the machine half of this - mould parts, build weapons systems - but I want to do the most personal parts of this myself. To put the two halves of you together with my own hands.

Have you ever seen _The Princess Bride_? It's a fairy tale love story, and it's very exciting even if the effects aren't great compared to most 80s movies. But there's a guy in it who brings people back from the dead, using lumps of clay covered in chocolate - so long as they're only 'sort of dead' or 'mostly dead' instead of 'all dead'. It's only a movie. But with you laid out in a tank in the underground lab, being slowly pushed towards synthetic living...I wish it were as simple as putting a ball of clay in your mouth. That would be much easier for both of us. The reality is a bit more sophisticated.

So let's raise the lid, and make you less dead.

My hand. Your hand. A few pads of metal fixed down with surgical glue, an adrenal shot, a current, a turn of the dial, a puff of oxygen on the smouldering process the tank's been working on you the whole week long.

Did you have to scream? It's not that bad, is it, being flooded with electricity and hormonal stimulation until they've drowned you back to life? I'm just bringing you home to somewhere nice and warm where you can't move or see or think, that's all. Oh please, would you really rather be dead in some unmarked grave in a combat zone? Wouldn't you rather be dead right here with me instead?

(Don't answer that.)

 

*

I do the important things alone. Make your corpse sort-of live, replace organs with pumps and joints with pneumatic improvements, reassemble you from serial-numbered parts sent over from a lab in California. And I get letters from Sigint asking how it's going, asking for data, as if I could turn all this tinkering with metal into a set of numbers for him to look at - as if that was the _point_ of what I'm doing with you. I'm sure, to them, that it is; they want to know how to make better soldiers, they don't just want one perfect one. But if practical experiments are so unimportant to me, I don't need to do them alone, do I? I can get a research assistant. There's only twenty-four hours in a day (but Zero's working on it), so someone else can design the supersoldiers for them.

I'm with you every waking moment - so much to do, and I've lost months just on the basics - replacing the back of your skull, wiring a power supply into your thighs so you can charge from the mains overnight, building a VR connection that feeds right into your brain so I can test you in imaginary battlescapes, or just pipe movies down the line to see how your brain signals respond. I'm trying to work with what's already there - a killer's instinct held together with flesh, flesh I can replace with metal, instinct I can reinforce with gene edits and the right stimuli. I put a blade in your re-crafted hand because I don't know if you've ever been without one. Omitting it would be like removing your fingers or toes.

It's not like the first Perfect Soldier Project. I've learned there's an age ceiling when it comes to personality erasure; I guess once you've had time to build up a lot of powerful emotional memories, even if I delete all the small stuff you keep stored up to tell you who you are, you'll still have something to cling on to - something I can't take away. How are you doing that? It's not in your body. I replaced most of that, backed up your muscle memories and erased all the parts that weren't about killing people. Wrap a human heart inside exoskeletal ribs, and it should be sealed off, not feeling anything. But you are. It's like your emotions stem from somewhere intangible. I'll keep running the experiment until I find it, even if it takes years.

But just looking at the initial tests, the way you kill in VR, I've been learning that you're so good it doesn't matter. You don't _need_ to be nothing to be perfect any more. You do need to be devoid of doubts and detached from your own ego, but being dead is enough to see to that. The brainwashing and the tame psychics - it was Cold War technology, and it's interesting background reading but we've moved on from that. Gene augmentation is enough. It's worked on you, it'll work on living soldiers - and I think that being part of the experiment will really bring them together as a unit. But I can't deal with them myself, not when I have you to think about. I need someone else here to take care of that.

So I'll put out a call for applications, then ask Ocelot to pick over the candidates. He'll definitely find the right person for us. He's an amazing interviewer.

 

*

To be honest, I was a little nervous this morning. I'm sure you'd think it was silly of me, but I'm just not used to dealing with people these days. They're not like they are in the movies - there's never an instant click, and eye contact is this awkward thing where you only see your own reflection anyway. People need so much improvement. If I could live forever I'd work on them all, one at a time - I'd mass-produce objects like you. As is, I don't want to be around them all that much; I can call my old friends on their birthdays, watch movies with you in the evenings, and be alright.

But we had to bring in someone. You and me, we can't go on alone forever.

I'd taken my time getting dressed, put on a little makeup for the first time in years, and so she got here ahead of me. She's sat on the edge of a desk and fiddling with her name badge, and I'm not sure, but I wonder if she feels the same way I do. "Dr Clark?" she says, and there's this little smile on her lips, so polite it could mean anything, it could have been practised for hours or it could be just the way she is, and I decide that maybe this is going to work out after all. We shake hands, and it's a bit weird - all these months fitting tiny metal gears into your knuckles, and I've forgotten what a human hand feels like.

I think over all the details I shared with Ocelot, all the things I needed and all the things he'd found in this woman sat with me right here. I ask her about her publication record, and it's a lot of original work for a young woman of twenty-something (and there's the look in her eyes and the cut of her skirt and if anyone other than Adam had been interviewing I'd wonder exactly how she gets these jobs), but I have known ever since I first laid eyes on you more than thirty years ago that no one can ever be too young to be brilliant. She's no killer, though. What she's done is gene alteration, artificial hybridisation, computer modelling of biological systems, and nanomachines.

Oh, nanomachines.

Little grafts of enzyme and cybernetics, so small that you can't craft them - you have to make them design themselves. They're tiny, priceless weapons, and - like everything the Patriots do - the control they exert isn't limited by physical proximity. They go everywhere the subject goes. They're like sunshine, like a signal transmitted from my hands straight to your body, making anything I like light up.

She's quite calm about the prospect, almost hedging on the possibility of success - says they're still only prototypes and she's not sure we should inject you with them yet. She says she's concerned about the potential side effects.

Screw that. You're dead, so come on, how much more harm can it _do_? So I'm just going to smile and then overrule her when the time comes.

"So can I see the cyborg in operation?" she asks, and her eyes are just shining like she's full of this intense curiosity, so bright it makes me miss being a young scientist myself - I was just like this back in the late 1950s, not long out of school and so eager to commit to someone else's project. She seems so dedicated already. I almost hate to disappoint her, but I have to.

"No," I reply. "It needs to stay in the culture tank for now." For always.

She nods. "I see." It's good to know she's going to be reasonable about you. "It'll be a pleasure to work with you, Dr Clark."

"Thank you, Dr Hunter."

She smiles again, more warmly than the first time, and it's...captivating. "Please, call me Naomi." I nod, and smile a little smile of my own. Naomi. Sweet. I'll be calling her that, and she'll be calling me Dr Clark; I never tell anyone my first name - not him, and not even you.

 

*

She's full of questions. They're the good kind of questions, though; mostly, they're about you. She's been going over the VR tests, trying to see the results of each gene transplant in terms of time taken, number of enemies killed, trying to see what's most useful, trying to pick out the building blocks for a genome army. It's so much more precise than my Gulf War experiments - you're half-machine, all digital, and VR is so much cleaner than battlefield testing. I can model anything, then sit back and watch you kill it.

She's still reticent about her nanomachines. She's reluctant about each new installation, stalling for clinically tested colonies rather than wanting to use you for raw trials - and it's like she realises how unique you are and doesn't want to damage you by being too ambitious with the testing. She never saw you in San Hieronymo. She doesn't realise why it has to be _you_.

I'm not Ocelot; I don't know a lot about persuasion, only provision of scientific advice, and I've been telling her that everything is for your own good. That we can use nanomachines to keep down your pain levels, to smooth out adrenaline curves, to stop you from thinking too much. Like anything else, they're not perfect, and really strong stimuli will always wear down their effects.

Some days, after she's left the lab for the night, I want to stay up all night and test how much you can take.

I've built all kinds of simulations; huge, flat empty ones, elaborate 3D grids with checkpoints at each corner, ones like places in the real world but with all the complications ironed out. Ones with entire armies to destroy, ones where you're left all alone, searching for something to kill. I've never had to issue instructions, only use the nanomachines to prime you for combat; you know what you're made for.

Is it real, to you? I'm never sure if you do mistake the tests for reality, or whether you've just forgotten that you ever had anything realer than this integrated automated vat-grown dream existence you have now. Do you remember how you used to kill real people? Is it any different, to you? It's so mechanical, the way you do it now - no need for thought, none of the brain activity that would indicate that you have a conscience; you're an automated killing program, and I'm just fixing all the bugs.

And I still haven't solved your troubling tendency to feel. Why do you still do that?

I've tried everything I can think of to stop it, and I'm going over the experimental schedule with her again wondering if I can divert a few days or a week away from all these soldier genes and combat nanos to really focus on destroying your emotions, and she asks, "So how soon do we plan to move on to live tests?"

"Live tests?" I blink at her, but she's looking as earnest and studious as ever, and so pretty too, sitting next to me at my desk and scrawling on a notepad like a secretary from a 60s movie, with stocking-tops poking out of her skirt (which I swear gets shorter every week, but who would she be dressing to impress? I am _old_, and it sure as hell isn't you.)

She nods. "All the simulations in the world can't tell us how well the soldier genes would work in a real battle situation. If it's a safety issue -"

_Please_, no. I clone people. There's an entire syndrome out there caused by something no one knows that I did. I'm a Patriot, and if I wanted to drop my cyborg on a godforsaken battlefield to see what happened if I did, then I would. "That's not the point," I say firmly. "I mean... You know all those experimental cures that work just fine in a petri dish, but then when you move on to a clinical trial -" I shrug. "It never goes perfect. The test subjects are non-compliant, the control group all enter spontaneous remission, there's a thousand new factors to worry about and even if you control the data for age, gender, medical history and so on, the best you can hope for is statistical significance. And in the lab, you're still getting 100% success. Medical science just works better in models than in people." And a virtual model is what you are now.

The genes are really _working_ in VR - I'm not going to settle for reality. There's too many other systems, other sciences, other laws of nature there to interfere. My assistant still looks sceptical. Maybe someone told her biology was a practical field. So I add, "Besides, we need to get the stealth unit working. A cyborg unit's no use to FOXHOUND if it can't hide."

It's been a real bitch, that. Your nervous system doesn't like it. Every time I try to wire it in, it either gets rejected or your brain fails to adapt to the switch. We'll get it done, though. That guy from Armstech is still helping me on it via email. I like him - he watches Japanese movies too. And he thinks he's working on the Strategic Defence Initiative - oh, if only he knew.

 

*

Call me touchy, but I don't often leave the lab when she's here, because that would mean leaving her alone with you. What we have is very special. I feel protective of that. But my office is only an adjoining room away, and some things can't wait til she's locked out for the night. I've got some exciting mail - new imports from Japan. Have you seen _Jisatsu Saakuru_? I guess not - it didn't come out til a couple of years after you died. The English title is 'Suicide Circle'. It'll be a good image stimulus for you to have while you're in VR - I've found violent movies help keep your brain ready for killing. There's this scene where fifty-four schoolgirls throw themselves in front of a subway train - but I shouldn't spoil it, we can watch it together this evening -

I open the door to the lab, parcel held under my arm, and there she is, standing by your tank.

It's okay. I'm the only one who could open it, anyway. She's my co-researcher, I don't have to feel jealous just because she's standing by you.

I don't have to feel like I'm doing anything wrong.

She hasn't seen me come back, I don't think. I wonder if I should say something? She's lost in thought about something - genes or nanomachines or anti-psychotic drugs or just _you_, but I know she doesn't see you the way I do. She's got her palms pressed flat on the top of the tank. It's foot-thick bulletproof glass, locked with an electromagnet so tough I don't think you could break out of there even if I did let you off the drugs for more than an hour.

I can't see her face, but her head is shaking a little. And in a small-voice whisper she says; _"Soon, I promise - and then him."_

What?

I shut the door noisily, as if I'd only just returned. I think she jumps, but I don't look at her. I'm going to go make some coffee.

 

*

I don't realise quite how much initiative she's taking until the day I come back from lunch and find she's changed your VR feed. I'd left you watching a movie. _Hachiko Monogatari_ \- another Japanese one, but not a horror movie. It's about a dog who used to follow his owner to Shibuya subway station every morning, and meet him there again at night when he came home from work. He kept going back to the station every day even after the owner died. It's a sad story, all about what loyalty means, and how powerful it can be even when you've been totally abandoned.

She's turned it off. She's done, I don't know, one of her hacker things and now she's piping a live sportscast into your brain instead. Of the Winter Olympics. She's taken it straight from a satellite uplink out there in Utah, so there aren't even any commercials. What the hell kind of killer cyborg does she think you are, that you'd sooner watch ladies' figure skating than Japanese melodrama?

"Look -" she said, quite patient and reasonable. "His brain's shifting into a much more stable pattern of delta wave activity. He's latching on to the visuals fairly easily."

"Oh." _His_ doesn't seem like the right word to me. Should be _its_. Or _your_. It's like she thinks you're still a person - I know that you're a thing, and I have always loved things more than people. "How did you know that would work?"

She smiles modestly, and peers at her shoes. I can't see the look in her eyes. "Just a guess I thought was worth trying. It's only fortunate the Olympics are in the USA this year."

I nod. Fortunate, yeah - especially for the IOC members we bribed to make it happen. We wanted the President I made to have an Olympics in his first term, and it's not like we'll miss the money. Do you see him there in the crowd, sat behind the American flag? The newspaper photos will be great. They'll make everyone feel so patriotic.

I look at the readout, and huh, I guess you _do_ find this interesting. I suppose it would be more exciting to me if I didn't know who was going to win, but hey, you get what you pay for. It feels weird that she's taken over your input like this, but in the end it guess doesn't matter if she wants to change what you watch. You're still locked in that box where no one can touch you, whatever's going through your mind.

 

*

She's been good for you. I'm glad to have her working for me; she really does know how to keep you stable, sometimes, as if stable was the only thing I want you to be. She's been good for me, too, like having a dark-petalled flower on the windowsill (if the lab had windows, which it doesn't), something fresh and elegant to look at, and at the end of one of these long afternoons of so little progress there's no way of distinguishing it from any of the other long afternoons of this month, this year, I can look up and see her sitting nose-down in data tables with her hair pinned up over her neck and just between you and me it can make me feel warm in places I think most people have forgotten I still have.

She's been good.

But you didn't hold the calm much past the end of the Olympics; we had you watching the reruns for a while, but that produced a distinctly diminishing curve. I'm disappointed, but I should have figured that the positive stimulation wasn't going to be enough to last. You always need more. You're _feeling_ again now. It's unfortunate.

Would you _please_ stop screaming? I've drugged you too much already this week. You're getting over-tolerant. It's not so much to deal with, is it? It's like the field hospital we had in the old days. You keep still, and I put wires in your nerves and your brain and the joints of your limbs and instead of sutures and styptics there's circuits and batteries and dripping hot solder and scalpel-carved niches for all the tiny wires - I'm just trying to make you better. To _cure_ you. It's a terminal disease, being human, you know that.

Okay, I can up the dosage and ask the lab to work out a new medication regimen. It'll take time to kick in. I guess we both need a break now - how about we watch a movie together?

...Have you ever seen _Deep Throat_?

 

*

I'm keeping your brain turned down for now - full of morphine and anti-psychotics. You can have it back when I'm done working on the stealth module - it's not yet reached symbiosis with the animal part of you, so I've spent all afternoon testing new bonding enzymes. I know you felt it when I pried it out of your spine, but it wouldn't get to you, right? You can handle this. I know you can.

So I've got it in a vat on the desk; the surface coating needs a few days to replicate at room temperature before it's mature enough to plug back into your nervous system. The engineer from Armstech warned me not to do this, because the power source is insanely radioactive, but I'm way too old to worry about tumours - it's in my genes, I'll never live as long as Zero anyhow - and you don't do the whole cell division thing any more because you're dead, so what does it matter? No one ever comes in here except for me, you and her.

I can't work on you until the stealth unit's ready, but at least I can be with you while I get on with other things. I'll just be sitting at my desk next to you and programming the nanomachines. Not the ones for the soldiers, but the ones that will keep him asleep. They're close to ready now, and then I can pull him out of cryo and inject them. He'll never wake up. He'll be a live body with a sleeping mind trapped inside it, and you'll still be a cold machine-corpse with a brain I'm doing my best to keep offline.

 

*

The worst thing about being in charge here is the paperwork. Most of it gets done by a secretary I never see, but some of it finds its way to my office. I don't like having to be in here. It's cosy - plain and panelled and plush - but it doesn't have you in it. You're in the very next room, sure, but I hate being out of your sight these days. I don't even sleep any more, some nights, I just stay in the lab running stress-tests on the exoskeleton, or sliding needles between the plates of your spine.

Some things the secretary just has to pass on upwards; sometimes it's private things, Patriot things, that I have to read over personally - and sometimes it's just that because I'm in charge I've got to sign off on the monthly budget and all the new lab acquisitions. So now I'm ticking off last month's departmental requisitions to show my approval of each new expense, whether I know or care what they're for - the license for an enzyme patent, probably already working its way through your valves; $300-worth of horror DVDs from Japan - okay, now that was me; double our usual quantity of morphine, your new battery, fifteen pounds of C4 explosive, a venus fly-trap, whatever, I'll sign off on anything - Underneath all that, there's a letter from the Patriots' team at the Pentagon. Some guy called Ames - do I know him?

He's asking for a reference for an applicant to a retroviral engineering project. One Dr Naomi Hunter.

Some spook is trying to poach my co-researcher? _Asshole_. You _need_ her - and I need her too. I'm not going to get angry. I'm not scrunching this up, not shredding it, and I'm too old to be getting up and storming out into the lab, or to pick up the phone and call to demand an explanation.

I get slowly to my feet. I have my own little world here - me, her, him and you - and it's been like this for years now, like a stable nucleus, like a four-cornered world I can _control_. I open the door to the lab, and she's there. She's not at her computer. She's not reading gene scans or VR test results. She's not programming her nanomachines.

She's sitting in my usual chair, right next to your tank, and it's like someone trod on a rose. Pretty, polished, skirt barely covering her stocking-tops, and there's tears cutting dark lines down her cheeks.

Her eyebrows fly up when she sees me, but she doesn't move. I feel suddenly unsteady, and I pick my way towards the two of you with careful steps. It's funny, the way her voice turns so calm and her face stays so blemished. "What is it?" she asks me, like she's just my co-researcher and it's just another long afternoon.

There was something. A letter. Doesn't matter right now. "I should be asking you that," I say instead.

She stares down at her shoes. (They're cute, sharp, black, because nothing allowable under lab regulations has ever adorned those feet.) "Yes," she replies, slowly. "I looked at him this morning -" through the frosted glass that she can't get through, because no one can except me - "And he - he was looking back into my eyes. I haven't seen such clarity in him since - since the day I came here. Like he recognised me. And his body's whole again. It's indestructible. It could be invisible. He's ready now, and doesn't that mean that...it's time? It's over?"

I sit myself on the desk beside her, my world quaking just a little. I lean an elbow on your tank to keep steady. I don't want her to be right. I don't want this to collapse into fission. I don't want this project to ever end.

But it won't. It's still held together. It _has to be_.

"It's okay, Naomi. It's a...patchwork. I've been doing all this a little piece at a time - exoskeleton, prosthetics, weapons, power, camo - Most days, there is no big picture. Like when you write genome soldiers -"

"When I write them. They're just editable gene codes -"

Not people. "Yes. We're not looking at the whole organism any more - the cyborg's just a, a set of _things_. It's rewritable sets of paired bases. It's a machine to reconfigure, it's a shell to stress-test, it's a weapons system -" You're a brain that needs drugging into nothingness. "We're scientists," and you're _science_. "If the work looks complete, all we need to do is to cut it up into smaller pieces, and keep working. You and me can always find new levels to alter him on. He doesn't have to be a whole person, not ever again."

She looks at me steadily. "You really think so?"

I do. She knows it.

There's nothing in the arrays of protons at your root that compels us to call it deoxyribonucleic acid. And if we know how rewriting your DNA might give you that one extra microgram of adrenaline, we can't explain exactly how, step by step, that tiny edit turns you into a better killer. We don't know how it pushes you into that exquisite violent craving that we see in the VR-scape. There's a dozen orders of magnitude between the atom and the machine, and science can't stretch to cover that gulf. Instead, we've got science_s_. Little pieces all rough-stitched together and sewn into your corpse.

I will never be able to explain what makes you perfect. You just _are_.

"So," and her eyes are getting damp again, and I can't explain that either, "Even now every part of him is -" Don't say whole. It's _hybrid_ now - "functioning, you and I can still..." She blinks, and she's like a butterfly, fluttering in the wake of my words. "I don't want to stop working with you. There's so much more we can do together."

_I got a letter that said -_

"So much...more." And she smiles, and it's awkward, and she puts out a hand, moving so slow, and I could stop her, but I keep letting it come until it's touching me, a thumb slipping over my knee.

_Oh._

I push my knees together, freezing her in place. No point in bullshit dancing around this. Why would she...? I am sixty-seven years old and can do _nothing_ to stop my telomeres fraying away into dust. I am _old_ and she is young, sweet, and almost as intelligent as I am. Why in hell is she making a pass at me?

She's quiet, now, still except for her fingers twitching between my knees and it's like she hasn't even thought of an answer to that herself yet. Maybe she's like you - half-primed to her base instincts, and half-shaped by my imagination.

They say we're all cyborgs - young women more than most. Lipstick and black lace, mechanical touches that turn a human body into a hybrid, a sex toy. What is she thinking, as she strokes her way up my thighs? Is she thinking?

She is, at least, tilting her face up to mine. "I think you still need me. And I know I still need you."

Really? "Oh." She has a point; I need her here as much as you do. If it weren't for her, I could be like one of Donald's AIs, calculating into forever, all thoughts and numbers, a tyrant with no shape and no form. She's the one thing that reminds me that I, unlike you, am a warm and living body as well as an idea.

We all are, we Patriots. Even the one whose mind is locked away forever now. We're ideas. We're still human. The older I get, the easier that is to forget.

Ten, even five years ago, I wouldn't have done it. It was nice to get offers, but I valued my seclusion enough to avoid taking them. I like my secrets, my private projects, and having no one know that I'm one of the most powerful people in the world. But at my age, I won't get many more offers - and she's walked inside all the secrets, even seen what I do to you, and if she doesn't know what I really am, she senses it. She'll bend her knees beneath it, if I make her.

It's a tempting offer, and it would feel - so - good to take it. Take _her_.

The hell with it. I reach a hand behind her neck, stroking at her hairline - it's like a test simulation, like making you experience something to see if you react the way you should do. And she tips her head back into my hand, lips parted so sensually that it's like she's just waiting for mine to meet them.

They can wait, while I drop little kisses along the line of her jaw instead, at the corner of her mouth, running up to her cheekbones, tasting powder and salt, that kind of desire that really wants to be desired itself, engineered and yet animal. When I'm working on you it's so easy to forget all the subtler ways to get a response out of someone. This wouldn't work on you, because you're a corpse; skinless, just flesh welded to metal, with no way to bring the blood to the surface again. But she's flushed and eager and easily lead by want.

Do you remember what it's like, loving women? Feeling someone's breath against your face, running a hand down her back and wondering what to stimulate next? You're so close to us, floating in the tank right behind me - if someone turned your radar nanoes on, you could see us. You could watch me putting my lips to her open mouth, slipping my tongue inside just that half-inch that makes someone give you a mile.

I let the heat spread to underused vessels, like it's activating programs long dormant and making them ready for some input again, and our mouths are still pressed together - even knowing she's young and she can't be valuing this chance the way I am, I've still got her lips tangling with mine as if to tell me that this new project is highly important to her.

"So you want us to go play doctor?" I ask her, twining her hair between my fingers.

"Yes. But, please -" She shoots a look over my shoulder, and it's pained, it's _beautiful_ \- "Let's go somewhere he can't see us."

It takes me a moment to work it out. She means _you_. She doesn't want us to fuck in front of you. Oh yeah, because she thinks of you as a person. How weird. She's walking towards my office - it would be so coy, if it weren't for that skirt, and the _way_ that she walks, all hips - and I guess she must love you in an entirely different way from me, if your eyes have so much meaning to her and she cares enough to be shy about your presence. But we both love you.

It's our love for you that's brought us together.

She doesn't want you to see. I'm going to follow her and shut the office door on you and lean back against the wood and have the respect to not tell you what happens next. I take off my shoes, and she, oh, she takes off my everything else.

 

*

I think I love still being human. I'm almost sorry that you'll never get to experience this again, flushed skin and hips that are totally done with going places for the day, that dry, easy buzz in the back of your head. And her. She's kinda sprawled against me, head on my shoulder and hands still - yeah - and I am surprised at myself, really, but I don't even want her to be anywhere else but right next to me, holding on.

I wasn't expecting it would feel like this - didn't know I'd ever want to be close to anyone except you, ever again, even if it's just for those five minutes after they gave you an orgasm when anyone would want to cling on to anyone and float away with them.

She's young. I guess sex is simple for her, easy come and easy go, but she's getting up off the desk, putting an arm around my shoulders and helping my boneless body into my chair. My back loves her for that, I'm telling you. Those expenses claims are scattered on the floor, along with the stapler, all my pencils and the box of long-armed pliers and tiny screwdrivers I was using on you yesterday evening - I don't think I even noticed when that hit the floor, huh...

"Hey," she grins. "How about I get you some coffee?"

I kinda groan in reply. Not sure about that whole speaking thing. I like watching her lips move, though, not to mention watching her leave, naked except for a black lace bra, and that's just for show. Back in the 70s we used to call this zipless fucking, but it's still got some hooks and eyes.

So I'll just wait here, feeling warm and invincible because it's always good to be naked in your own office. You know how (or maybe you don't, maybe it's not the same for guys) you can be _more_ than naked, depending on where you are, and what you've just been doing? Laid back in a desk chair waiting for your cute, _perverted_ assistant to bring you coffee is so naked I'm getting aftershocks just thinking about it. It's like any usual precautions - the ones I always have when I'm around anyone except you - were melted away by her hot little tongue and -

...Where did I put my wrist tag?

_\- thunk._

...There's a two-foot length of steel sticking through my office door, and it's quivering.

_Oh._

END


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